MAGIX VEGAS Pro Free Download 22.0.0.239 +

CONS of MAGIX VEGAS

• Interface lacks conveniences found in competitors
• Multicam is nearly unusable
• No welcome panel with tutorials
• Some program instability

Interface and Getting Started

MAGIX VEGAS Pro (x64) uses the traditional three-panel layout, with source at top left, preview top right, and timeline along the entire bottom length of the screen. You can’t have dual preview windows for source clip and project, but you can switch the video preview window between a Trimmer mode for source clips and the project preview. The panels are proportionally resizable, but no longer undockable. You can easily see a full-screen preview of your project or source, however.

There’s no welcome screen, interface-introducing wizard, or tutorials when you start up, like those you find in PowerDirector, VideoStudio, Pinnacle Studio, and Premiere Pro. Vegas Pro also uses terminology that may be offputting to novices, such as envelope, bus, and quantize. That said, there’s plenty of tutorial content on the Vegas website.

Create Custom Presets

There are eight preset Window Layouts, and you can create custom ones of your own. You can only switch among them from the View > Window Layouts menu options, though some have compound keyboard shortcuts. Most modern programs have mode-switching buttons for more ease. The Add and Arrange Media layout is simply a storyboard with square clip thumbnails, which you can reorder if you hold down the Alt key. You can also pre-trim the included clips within the thumbnails in this view.

Menu text was tiny on my QHD monitor, though there’s a Use High DPI Scaling option in Preferences; some apps only apply this for 4K, however. The Preview Device settings already had my 2560×1440 resolution, so that’s good. You can set dark, medium, light, and while interface background and customize track-head colors.

Highly Configurable

The program is extremely configurable: In fact, there are no fewer than 14 tabs on the Preferences dialog box. And the General page of Preferences has a list of 42 check boxes with descriptive text. The Preferences dialog could use some tightening up: The General section is an endless list of checkboxes, and though the dialog already has too many tabs, some grouping of these options would help. There’s no search in Preferences, but I do appreciate the search box for everything in the source and effect panel.

You resize the timeline tracks with plus and minus controls at lower right, but if the cursor changes to a magnifying glass when it’s above the timeline, the latter will shrink to a very small size. Nicely, spinning the mouse wheel forward and back lengthens and shortens the timeline zoom level.

Oddly, double-clicking on a clip duplicates it on the timeline; for most apps, doing so offers editing options. This double-clicking gives you an easy way to get media from the source panel into the timeline, but it seems strange that Vegas Pro works this way when you click on a clip that’s already in the timeline. Double clicking a thumbnail in the source panel also adds it to the timeline, but oddly there’s no right-click option for doing so.

Project Notes

A relatively new feature is Project Notes. You can color code notes and link them to a timecode in the timeline. You can even jump to the associated timecode from a note. It’s a useful tool, especially for collaboration.

There’s a huge list of keyboard shortcuts available, but some are nonstandard. For example, the Spacebar doesn’t simply start and stop playback, but you need to start play with Enter and stop with Spacebar. You can change this in Preferences, though, and the keyboard shortcut list is entirely customizable. Vegas does use the familiar J, K, and L keys for reverse, stop, and forward. When you move the timeline position indicator, you can’t just move it as fast as you like. Instead, it moves at a ramping shuttle-style speed, though you can reposition the cursor without playing.

Vegas Hub and Stock Media

If you need to beef up your video with b-roll, Vegas Hub gives you an easy way to get video or audio clips, but it doesn’t add them to the Clip Explorer automatically after download. Unfortunately, I could only open the Hub dialog by digging into menus—a button would be nice. There is, ironically, a button for logging out of the Hub. What’s more, the Vegas mobile app’s only function is to transfer media from your phone to your Vegas Hub, but there’s nowhere in the Hub to see what you’ve uploaded, and there’s no option for its online storage in the Import menu.

Basic Editing

You add clips to your project by clicking the Import button, choosing them from the in-program version of Windows’ File Explorer, or dragging them onto the source panel or timeline directly from File Explorer.

Vegas Pro lets you work with all the formats today’s pro video editor may need, including AVCHD, BlackMagic Raw, HEVC, 8K, HDR, R3D, and XAVC S. When you add clips that use protected codecs, such as HEVC, Vegas pauses to activate the codec license, which isn’t so bad. You used to have to pay for the codec separately, which was a drag.

You add keyword tags to clips by checking the Media Tags checkbox from the Views button dropdown, and you can assign shortcut key combinations to add those you use frequently. That button also lets you switch between thumbnail, details, and list views. The Clip Explorer on the left side of the source panel shows an Explorer-like tree structure for All Media, Media by Type (letting you switch between viewing only videos, photos, or audio clips), and Bins.

The timeline doesn’t show any tracks or track heads when you start editing, they only appear after you’ve added media. You get all the pro-level editing options—Normal Edit, Shuffle, Slip, Slide, Time Stretch, and Split. You can select a region and use Split (S on the keyboard) to remove it and close up the neighboring media. A nifty Smart Split option blends clips with a Warp Flow transition so that talking-head edits aren’t jarring.

Magnetic Snap Feature

Magnetic snapping is the default, which snaps clips together when you move them within range. Automatic Crossfades and Auto Ripple are also default settings. You can turn these off with buttons below the timeline. A Nested Timeline button lets you turn the current sequence into its own separate entity, to ease reuse in other projects.

Flashy Video Effects

Getting to the transitions choices in the source panel is easy: you click the Transitions bar under the source panel. Thumbnail diagrams depict the transitions’ effects, and they’re grouped into 26 categories, from 3D Blinds to Zoom. When you drag a transition onto the timeline, a dialog pops up with an old-school dialog of sliders and some talk about “plug-in chains.” Don’t let this deter you: You can dismiss it and the transition will be in place. Keep in mind that your clips need enough overlap. The program won’t fabricate that for you, as some other consumer video editors do.

Picture-in-Picture

Vegas offers a few different ways to create Picture-in-Picture (PiP) effects, with the Video FX Picture-in-Picture tool being the easiest. It offers six preset layouts, but when you drag a clip from the source panel or File Explorer, Vegas won’t nudge an existing track down, so creating PiP windows takes extra steps: You must either create a new track above the existing one you want it to overlay.

The Media FX Picture in Picture plug-in shows a dialog with sliders and numbers for positioning the PiP, but, thankfully, you can also resize and position the PiP on-screen in the video preview window. It’s somewhat less friendly than getting PiP effects in other consumer video editors, which often use a simpler process and offer more preset PiP templates.

Motion Tracking

As with most advanced effects, you get to the Motion Tracker from the list of Video FX that appears along the left rail after tapping that mode’s button at the bottom of the source panel. Vegas recently moved the tool from Bezier Masking effect to its own dialog box. You get just a single effect that you drag onto to the clip you want to use tracking on in your timeline. Doing so pops up a message telling you to choose the Tools > Video > Motion Tracking menu option. This is not to be confused with the Track Motion choice in the same menu.

As with most motion tracking tools, you select a mask area to be tracked, but your only option is a quadrilateral selection area. There are five tracking options Perspective, Location, Rotation & Location, Scale & Location, Shape & Location. If one doesn’t work, you can try another. Most of the software I’ve tested doesn’t offer these choices. The Perspective option yielded odd results, so I’m not sure why it was the default. Unfortunately, the all-important buttons to start the tracking process were initially hidden below the bottom of the dialog, which could be disconcerting to novices.

Multidirection Tracking

You can track in both directions, forward, backward, or frame-by-frame. The last option lets you redraw the selection mask for fine-tuning. Location worked best for me, but I could see where the others could be useful. For example, perspective makes sense if you’re tracking a screen or a license plate. One plus: The tracking tool is faster than others I’ve used, even with the Precise setting.

The workflow for actually doing something with your track—applying effects, objects, or overlays—isn’t straightforward. I needed to consult a web video made by a Vegas user to figure this out. Turns out you have to add another track for whatever you want to use with the track—text, photo, video, or effect.

Then you go back to the Motion Tracking dialog and choose the overlay or text from the dropdown. Getting a blur or other effect onto the tracked mask is much harder than in other programs. You need to transfer the motion track to a Bezier masking effect. You then have to reorder the effect chain to get a blur inside the track mask. This is not for those who want a quick project.

Speedup and Slowdown

Changing the speed of your video isn’t simple as it is in other programs: There’s no simple slower and faster choice: A Slow Motion plug-in under Effects first analyzes the media (a slow process) and then lets you select a speed reduction. In my testing, preview playback looked like a slideshow, whether I chose the Morph or Optical Flow method, though the latter was somewhat better.

To speed up video, you insert an envelope for the event, and then find the Velocity line in the timeline track and drag it up and down to speed up or slow down the event. It seemed odd that changing the speed this way didn’t change a clip’s length on the timeline—in most apps, if you speed up a clip, it gets shorter on the timeline, since it takes less time.

A freeze-frame tool is available after you’ve inserted an envelope, but that freezes the moment for the entire rest of the clip. An easier way is to manually split the clip, add space to the timeline, and insert a still image from your clip to create the effect.

Color Grading

This is one of the best new features in the latest version of Vegas Pro. The color grading panel is clear, simple, and powerful. You get wheels for Lift (affects dark areas), Gamma (midtones), Gain (bright), and Offset (overall). You also get a Photoshop-like Curves graph, HSL sliders, and LUT support. A vectorscope shows your media’s color use, and you can switch the radar look to RGB Parade, Waveform, or Histogram. Included Look LUTs can give your video the appearance of Hollywood movie genres or old films.

Text and Titles

Text is considered a Plug-in in MAGIX VEGAS Pro (x64) , and I wish it felt more surfaced and integrated. However, once you get in, there’s a decent choice of text formats and customizations. Many of these offer animations, which you can keyframe to taste. You can add shadow and outline effects to the many font choices.

Most of this is done in the Video Media Generators dialog box, but you can adjust the size and position in the video preview window, but not the rotation. Most of the consumer video editors I’ve reviewed—PowerDirector, Pinnacle, and VideoStudio—offer more engaging text options, such as using your video content to fill the text or wacky effects such as flames.

Multicam Editing

The app does support multicam editing, but like so much else in the program, it’s hard to find the tools you need. Indeed, I didn’t have much success with the tool. When I chose Synchronize Audio to Align Events, it thought for a moment and moved my clips on the timeline, but the clips were drastically not in sync. When I then aligned them visually using the audio waveforms and checked Enable Multicamera Editing, the Create Multicamera Track (which is the last step in the process) was grayed out. I will update this article if I can find a solution from Vegas support.

Audio Editing

MAGIX VEGAS Pro (x64) shows audio waveforms in the timeline clips, and to separate audio from a video clip, you need to choose Group > Remove from from a menu. A simple option to separate audio would be nice, but once you get the concept down it works fine. That’s even more the case when you learn the keyboard shortcut for this action is simply the U key.

The Mixing console opens when you choose the Audio Mixing windows layout, and it shows volume sliders (aka faders) for any audio tracks in your project along with a Master volume control (or bus). You can add FX for equalization, reverb, and noise gating. You won’t see any canned background soundtracks or sound samples in this view, though you can open the Vegas Hub to download these. There’s no beat finding or clip-length matching such as you you find in Pinnacle Studio and Adobe Premiere Elements, however.

Exporting Options

You get a slew of formats, settings, and customizations for outputting your video project from Vegas Pro. But there are no choices for device type or online targets—other programs let you choose the iPhone or Vimeo as a output targets, for example. Here it’s just codecs and numbers. There’s no MKV option either, but you can export to Apple PreRes, Ogg Vorbis, and of course Sony formats such as MXF and XDCAM EX.

Performance

MAGIX VEGAS Pro (x64) starts up quickly, was mostly stable during my test editing, and moved briskly in most operations. To get acceptable rendering speed, I had to customize the export template settings to use NV Encoder from Mainconcept AVC. I tested on my home workstation, a PC running 64-bit Windows 10 Pro with a 3.4GHz Core i7 6700 CPU, 16GB RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650. A driver update option within the program’s Help menu found the latest driver for my Nvidia GTX 1650 and downloaded it, but I still had to run the updater utility from File Explorer.

Conclusion:

MAGIX VEGAS Pro 22.0.0.239 (x64) offers a full slate of video editing tools, but they’re not organized in a way that nonprofessional enthusiasts can easily grasp, despite some recent improvements.